


dance into the hunger of the earth

by Dialux



Series: i promise not to follow it [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: 'do i want to find out what causes my immortality, Family Issues, Feral Booker Like Whoa, Gen, How Family Whets Their Tongues On The Blood They Love, Mad Scientists, OR do i want to throw myself into traumatizing warzones', Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Scientific Shenanigans, Suicidal Tendencies, and then he picks both, booker's dilemmas include
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:46:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28631967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: There really should be a word for someone deliberately, thoughtfully, creatively choosing to do stupid things. All of Booker’s two-hundred year old vocabulary doesn’t quite seem up to the task.[Booker wants an explanation for his immortality, but his methods of doing so are... questionable.]
Relationships: Andy | Andromache & Booker | Sebastien & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusef & Nicky | Nicolò, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Series: i promise not to follow it [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1893748
Comments: 64
Kudos: 143





	1. we mapped our way north by the stars

**Author's Note:**

> Just clearing out old drafts, so I'm not certain when/if this will be updated. The story's set a little while after Lima.
> 
> Title comes from [here.](https://dialux.tumblr.com/post/638750407704854528/say-god-forgive-them-they-know-not) It's... inspired partly by [ this tumblr post, ](https://dialux.tumblr.com/post/627895583270649856/any-time-i-wanna-get-sad-i-think-about-how-someone) though we haven't gotten to the actual Family Feels bit yet!

Booker’s made many, many mistakes in his life. He knows this; he’s never thought of himself with rose-tinted glasses. He’s selfish and he’s bitter and he’s cowardly, he’s vicious and petty and small. He loves few people and those he loves, he loves to the depths of his shriveled-up heart.

Never before in his life has he trusted people too  _ much. _

So the mistakes that Booker’s made over the past year can be categorized very simply:

  * He was too cowardly to tell the others the truth about his despair;
  * He was too idiotic in ensuring his role in the betrayal remained unknown;
  * He was too trusting of Copley’s discernment.



He’s worked his way back into their good graces by saving them. It’s not like it had been before- not least because of Nile, who’s smart and funny and impressively good at deflating their egos with the right phrase at the right time- but it’s  _ fine,  _ and it’s more than Booker had ever expected, really, so, you know, whatever. He can withstand his worse impulses for some time.

Because here’s the thing: Booker hadn’t been  _ wrong. _

He’d been too cowardly and too idiotic and too trusting. But none of those things made the actual goal that he’d been aiming for bad. He was not wrong to want an end. 

After all, not all of them can be like Andy, running for her entire life from everything that scares her; not all of them can be Nicky or Joe, desperate to be with each other for every scrap of time possible; not all of them can be Nile, used to counting her blessings even while drowning in grief and cruelty and loss. Booker is Booker, and he is so fucking tired of just accepting these miracles, of testing these miracles against sword and fire and gun, of living with the unknown. Booker is Booker, and he’s never known a mystery he couldn’t unpack or a truth he couldn’t discover. Booker is Booker, and the only thing he’s got on the line right now is some pain, really, and he can survive pain, as he’s already proven.

He’s  _ tired. _

For a time it is fine. For a time, Booker is fine. While they’re all together and doing the things they do, Booker can put the thought of it out of his mind. 

It comes to a head when they go for a vacation.

Andy says she’ll train Nile to get over her fear of heights in the rather frightening mountainous monasteries of China. Joe and Nicky take off for Australia, apparently desirous of free time where they won’t risk being interrupted by an infuriating axe-wielding mortal, irritatingly chirpy twenty-seven year old, or Booker, who has more empathy but also less compassion for their situation; surely they should have gotten over the fucking like rabbits stage by the time they turned sixty? Lord knew Booker had, and never really gotten back into it.

The thing is Booker has zero desire to follow Andy to China, or Joe to Australia. So he tells them all that he’ll meet up with them in six months in Lisbon and takes off for Antwerp. Booker spends a week there, working through an impressive amount of chocolate and gin- and gin  _ in  _ chocolates, which remains one of the best inventions of the modern world; fuck the internet and freely available hot water and antibiotics- which are, respectively, what Joe and Andy and Nicky will say are their favorite developments- before he drinks enough that all his attempts to  _ not  _ think about it drown a very bitter death.

_ Curiosity killed the cat. This is a stupid thing to do. Knowing things just for the sake of knowing them is a really,  _ really  _ stupid reason to put yourself through this much pain. Wasting this much money on something that might not  _ do  _ anything is even stupider. You’ve spent a lifetime being idiotic. _

Booker knows all this.

_ Well, then,  _ he thinks, and throws back the rest of his no-longer-warm coffee, and retreats to his hotel room, hands jammed in his pockets.  _ If I’ve spent two and a half centuries being an idiot, there really isn’t much point in changing, is there? _

He whistles as he walks in. It’s the Jaws theme, which doesn’t really make any of this less macabre, but at least Booker isn’t a pissed-off morose bastard any longer; he was getting sick of being inside his own head. Turns out making terrible life decisions always leaves him a little happier than it should.

…

_ Why,  _ he imagines Andy demanding loudly.

_ Habit,  _ Booker replies. Then he pauses to think about it.  _ And curiosity. Don’t blame me for not being happy with  _ your  _ ignorance, you mangy, bloodthirsty maniac. _

…

It starts out small; Booker spends most of the six months getting his hands on the apparatus in a way that can’t be traced back to him. When nine out of ten mass spectrometers are used for laboratory needs- sure, pharmaceutical companies don’t tell people  _ what  _ they’re doing, but shipping a fancy thing to a place with the term  _ BIO  _ in it tends to at least mitigate the worst of the impulses- trying to get one for private use is not  _ impossible,  _ but also not easy either. There are other, less esoteric things he wants as well; a DNA-sequencing kit, some high-end centrifuges, a decent amount of glass apparatus. It isn’t impossible, solely because Booker spent time developing his own plant strains- for concentrated uppers  _ and  _ downers- in the early 1850s and remembers a goodly portion of that work. 

It  _ is  _ frustrating, but frustration’s a better outlet for Booker than depression, and left with nothing else to do he’ll probably start hallucinating his wife’s corpse. He’s done it before- when he got thrown into a mass grave back sometime before the advent of electricity- and someone’s hand ended up gripping his hair and setting with rigor mortis before he could escape. Booker hadn’t moved at all, not until Nicky dragged him out and ripped half the hair off his scalp in the process; he’d been very busy dreaming of Clotilde. He’d then spent the next three decades trying to both avoid her and see her, and only really come out of it by dint of time softening the memory into something less visceral.

So inside of six months, he’s got a neat amount of things arranged around him, and he can start with the first phase of The Plan.

_ This is idiotic,  _ he reminds himself, every day. Every morning, he asks himself:  _ Do I still want to do this?  _ And every morning, he gives himself the same answer and sets about making it happen.

There really should be a word for someone deliberately, thoughtfully, creatively choosing to do stupid things. All of Booker’s two-hundred year old vocabulary doesn’t quite seem up to the task.

…

That is a lie. 

Not the idiocy part; that much can’t really be made to sound better than it is. No. The thing that takes Booker such a long time is not gathering the material: he’s an accomplished con artist. He’s very good at getting four people that don’t look like they belong- and their  _ medieval weaponry-  _ to where they want to go. A fucking mass spectrometer? Slap a label on a building called  _ BIO-something  _ and people won’t think twice. DNA sequencing technology’s on every college campus. There are literal black markets for selling glass apparatus; he doesn’t need to do much more than flex his fingers for those.

Booker gets all of those things in about a month’s time.

No, what takes him five agonizing months is the decision of where to set up his lab.

…

To be clear, it makes some sense: setting up in France- or Belgium, or Switzerland, or anywhere else where French is commonly spoken- is a bad idea because that’s where the team is going to check first if Booker ever really messes up and can’t return. Setting up in less affluent cities or countries would make sense if not for the fact that Booker doesn’t want to bring attention to himself or his shiny equipment when he doesn’t know how long he plans to maintain the safehouse. He needs to think of a place where the team will not come, and a place where he can be safe, and a place where he won’t stand out.

It takes him four and a half months to realize that the answer has been staring him in the face the entire goddamn time.

…

Genoa.

…

Nicky refuses to step into it, and Joe’s followed his lead. Booker’s gone there a few times, just to see if there really is something interesting in the narrow winding streets. Andy rolls her eyes at Nicky’s tantrums whenever their missions take them close, but she was also the one who told Booker not to joke about it in very quiet and very fierce terms back when he was newly slipping into the team.

So: this is one place where Booker can be safe.

…

Six months gone, and they meet up in Lisbon. Nile walks differently now, feet less ginger on the earth, weight held lower. She and Andy regale him with stories of clouds and stone and three times Nile died, because she panicked and slipped, pissed off the wrong person and got thrown off a three-hundred foot cliff, and shoved Andy to safety, thereby launching herself into the open air, respectively. Joe and Nicky join them as Nile’s winding her story down, both glowing the tan of a good summer spent in Australia, and spend a good hour discussing how beautiful the Australian outback is when one doesn’t need to worry about being poisoned. 

Booker smiles and laughs, and talks up Antwerp’s chocolates and gin, then discusses a bank heist in Zurich that never really happened, then shows off some truly beautiful pearls that he’s set into some shoddy unrusting platinum rings for them from the money off of the imaginary heist.

None of them will ever wear it, but that isn’t the  _ point. _

The point is that Booker’s spent four and a half months nervously and furiously working on his stock portfolio while he decides where to put his lab, and he’s too pale and lacking in muscle to convince any of the observant fuckers that he was on  _ vacation,  _ so he’s had to come up with something suitably distracting.

Ugly rings are just awkward enough of a gift that they all thank Booker and stop asking questions. Mention the word  _ portfolio  _ and their eyes glaze over. The gin and chocolate is the bit of truth, mixed into the lies to make it more reasonable and more palatable. By the time his two minute twenty-two second speech is done- yes, Booker timed it, he’s a fucking  _ professional,  _ alright?- they all look rather thankful that it’s over.

(Booker does wonder when they’ll cotton onto the fact that he only goes on a spiel when he’s terrified. 

Turns out that it doesn’t matter how many times a person lies: they still get scared shitless when they have to do it next. It’s quite a funny world that way.)

The only thing they do after that is to clap him on the shoulder. Andy grins at him and says, in rather a scary tone, “We’ll need to get you back in shape, then,” and Booker accepts the ribbing without any issues.

There’s the tiniest spark of regret festering somewhere near his ankles. All the lies. All the secrecy. None of the others would approve. They’d probably do something monumentally catastrophic, like blow up his lab the minute he turned his back on Genoa. And he can’t even blame them for it. 

But if there’s one thing Booker knows, it’s how to lie.

If there’s one thing Booker knows, it’s how to lie to his family.

…

Booker’s sequenced DNA doesn’t throw up any red flags. Of course, he isn’t getting the whole genome sequenced; just the parts that are known to vary highly between two individuals of the same species. He hadn’t really expected to get anything wildly different; they’re all still human, after all. But something weird would’ve at least given him a starting point.

As it is, the next time he has a free day, he drives to Genoa and extracts some blood to see if there’s any difference under a microscope.

There isn’t.

…

_ Of course  _ there isn’t.

Cutting one of their limbs off meant that limb stayed just a limb. It didn’t grow to become its own human. Once it left their body, it became normal again. Analyzing the blood after treatment would leave it as normal as the DNA he’d donated. In fact, Booker would bet good money that the DNA that left his body was the same DNA as he’d had back in 1812, on the day that he first died and came back to life. On a scientific level that makes very little sense, but it makes  _ some  _ sense, if Booker ignores everything about epigenetic research from the past twenty years.

…

So the most obvious thing is to try to real-time analysis. The problem with that is that real-time analysis isn’t really  _ real-time;  _ there’s a time-lag to everything because a machine needs time to process things. And Booker doesn’t know if he’s on the right track or if he’s just throwing things at a wall and hoping they’ll stick. It’s a frustrating place to be, but: better frustrated than depressed, as the French say.

…

Three years later, Booker hooks up the veins in his elbows to a machine that’s supposed to be used for dialysis, only he’s re-purposed it to feed the blood into a mass spectrometer in a tenth of a second. The blood should be pre-treated, but he isn’t doing that because he doesn’t have time if he’s trying to get the best real-time analysis possible; the blood should also feed back into his body because that’s the point of the dialysis machine: it feeds blood back into his system after the ostensible cleaning. 

Only the mass spectrometer doesn’t, actually, have a meaningful output like a dialysis machine would. It’s a- minor- mistake. Really. Whatever blood is supposed to come back into his veins just… doesn’t.

It takes Booker a bit too long to realize this- he blames that on the blood loss- and by then he’s invested enough blood into getting the data that he decides to fuck the consequences. He exsanguinates in four hours and thirty-eight minutes. Booker regains consciousness solely because he twitches hard enough in his death throes that a tube dislodges and his blood starts staying in his body. 

By then, there’s blood soaking through half the lab and he needs to spend the rest of his week alone cleaning it up. The mass spectrometer’s gone and fucking shut down, unable to atomize Booker’s apparently too-thick blood.

Still, there’s a good ream of data that the poor machine transferred over to the computer before collapsing. Booker lets himself, cautiously, call it progress.

…

Booker probably does frighten the living daylights out of the lady who lives across the street when she sees the blood-spattered carpets he’s hauling down to dispose. He realizes it a little too late; he’s cursing under his breath and juggling the far too-heavy material down the seven flights of stairs, and only nods to her very absently.

_ Ah, well,  _ he thinks, and shrugs fatalistically.  _ What’s the worst that can happen? _

…

(He’s a goddamn  _ idiot,  _ honestly. There’s a reason why he isn’t an optimist. The universe really loathes him, on some deep, molecular level.)

…

The mass spectrometric findings are pretty much what a normal person’s blood would have. The only things missing in the broad spectrum analysis are the free radicals. Booker spends an hour puzzling over it before discarding the idea; sure, free radicals are reactive, and could, in a pinch, help explain their long lives. But on their own, how can they account for the healing? For the returns from death? 

Yet another dead end.

It’s really, really fucking frustrating, honestly. No wonder there are so many stories of mad scientists; it’s a maddening subject.

…

Then, he’s on a mission in Suriname. 

Nile’s responsible for the explosives; she’d taken point on that in the months that he’d been banished and never relinquished the spot. Booker has instead become the sneaky one: he’s the guard on the inside, the one who makes things just that little bit worse by dint of shuffling records badly, or replacing the gun oil with some honey the night before Joe and Nicky and Andy have to break in.

Right now, Booker’s spent three weeks working himself into a Guyanese drug gang that’s spilled over into Suriname. The corporation is much larger than he’d assumed at first; Booker’s spent the past three weeks quietly panicking over just that. 

They’d stumbled onto the gang when complaints of medical shortfalls reached Copley’s ears and Andy realized it was a corrupt MSF doctor, dealing antibiotics under the table to the local gang. It isn’t so much that they think they can bring down the gang wholly- though they’d hoped for it when initially walking into this mess- but that they’d like to keep them out of Suriname, at least, and especially the Surinamese government.

For which they need the name of the political guy trying to invite this drug gang into his country.

Booker’s wormed into tougher situations before. He dyes his hair dark, slurs his mouth around the harder syllables in a pale imitation of a Costa Rican accent, sticks a bottle of tub-brewed alcohol in his back pocket, and strolls straight into the headquarters. It takes him three weeks to figure out who it is, and _that_ is Copley’s fault, goddammit.

After grimacing his way into the bathroom, Booker uses the remaining drops of alcohol in his bottle to wet his handkerchief, lights it up, and tosses it out of the window.

Hopefully someone will see it.

He doesn’t have time to think about what’ll happen if they don’t. He spends the rest of the evening going through the building, greeting people and casually gathering the pieces of a gun he’d scattered about the first day he walked into the building. When Joe  _ finally  _ sneaks up to him, Booker’s both grumpy with the tension and hungover, which isn’t necessarily a pleasant combination.

“Where the  _ fuck  _ were you?” he snarls.

“It isn’t like you made it easy to find you,” Joe retorts. “You got it?”

“It’s the fucking secretary,” says Booker. 

“Oh. Seems straightforward, doesn’t it?”

“Copley didn’t give me pictures to go with the government officials, so you can blame him for your boredom, you adrenaline-addicted  _ donkey.” _

“I,” says Joe, “can blame multiple people for the same thing.”

“Glad to see you’ve grown up,” Booker tells him sweetly.

That’s when the compound goes up in lights. Joe tosses him an earpiece, through which Booker can hear Nile barking something to Nicky and Andy shouting at Copley. Through silent agreement, they circle down without gunfire. If they’re on the ground level before they’re found out, they can probably lose their trackers in the forest. 

Then Joe gets shot, twice, once in the shoulder and the other in his neck. The third would’ve gotten him in the head if Booker didn’t bodycheck him and let the bullet break about half his own face.

The pain is fucking  _ blinding.  _ Booker’s vaguely aware of the noise wrenching out of his throat, low and unstoppable- so he doesn’t bother trying to stop it. Instead, he lifts a- trembling- arm, and shoots the man. Then he hauls Joe’s arm over his shoulder and breaks into a run, mumbling mangled status updates to Nile as she demands them. She seems to be getting frustrated with him, but Booker’s got a jaw that’s currently reconstructing itself, so tough beans to her.

“Bombs,” Joe croaks out, when he returns to life.

Booker doesn’t stop running, though he does stumble once out of sheer relief. “Where?”

“Seeded. Everywhere. Circle.”

“You’ve been busy,” Booker tells him admiringly.

“Needed something to do while you were having fun,” Joe grunts out.

Then Nile’s voice takes on the high, panicked edge it only very, very rarely gets, and Booker switches attention to it.

“They found the timer, they’ve  _ found-  _ you need to get out! Now! It’s a ticking time bomb! You have to get out  _ now!” _

They try. They really do. And they both make it almost out of range of the bombs- enough that the fire doesn’t kill them, though the shockwave does.

_ Time bomb,  _ is Booker’s last thought, before blissful darkness takes him.  _ Tick-tock. A time bomb. I wonder if- _


	2. until there were no stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We can’t get food poisoning.”
> 
> “We can’t _die_ of food poisoning.”
> 
> “What a pity,” says Booker pitilessly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hm. Still unsure about when Ch. 3 will come, but... here you go?
> 
> Also, yk, warnings for this entire series do apply to this chapter. Everyone is a bit miserable and a bit angry and a bit unsure of how to fix things.

_ You know what else is a bomb? _

Booker wakes up, groaning, on a helicopter. Nicky’s before him, white-faced, and Joe’s staring at him, too, looking like he might be as white as Nicky if not for his dark skin.

“You look like shit,” Booker drawls.

He winces, touching his cheek gingerly. Healing the internal organs must have taken priority over the broken cheekbone, which is why he’s still got a sore face. Booker considers the nearest source he’s got for a good knock-out drug- it’ll have to be strong to work on him- but then he remembers the awful paint-peeler that Andy’d snuck onboard, and stumbles his way over to it.

“You’re telling us,” says Nicky, a little numbly.

Booker rolls his eyes, pops off the cap, and collapses downwards to better drain the bottle without breaking his face again. “Mitigating circumstances. I got shot in the face and then hit with a bomb. What’s your fucking excuse?”

“Worry,” says Nicky, clipped. “About you.”

“You took your sweet time coming back,” says Joe.

“Mmm. Probably the blood loss.”

The plane jerks, and some of the alcohol spills onto the still-shutting wound on his face. Booker closes his eyes through the pain. Experience teaches a person not to scream; it just leaves one’s throat raw, and doesn’t actually help a situation.

(Nicky had told him that, once, while embedded in the Pyrenees. Booker had laughed in his face and screamed all the louder when he was gunned down later that day.)

“You guys outed the secretary, didn’t you?” he asks, when he can speak without wanting to die. 

“Andy’s on that.”

“Good,” says Booker, and leans his head back so there’s darkness curling over his eyes too, darkness as true and unforgiving as death. “Good.”

…

They land in a half-decimated airstrip near Rio. Booker, hair still dyed dark, takes point and directs everyone to a safehouse nearby. There’s mold everywhere when he opens the door, and the sofa looks more like it belongs in a forest than in a house, but there are also three separate bedrooms and running water, which he and Joe definitely need.

It usually doesn’t matter how many bedrooms there are; Joe and Nicky prefer the safety of communal sleeping directly after a mission, and Andy’s got about as much shame as a raccoon’s got colored fur, and Booker’s never really cared enough either way. But he wants the privacy right now- he can feel the thoughts coalescing in his head like little sunflowers bursting from a field, one after the other- and he can’t do it while surrounded by a still-traumatized Nicky or a quietly morose Joe. 

“You take the shower first,” says Joe, and Booker nods his thanks.

It’s perfunctory; scrubbing off the blood and mud, not anything relaxing. The last time he did something relaxing was when he took those damned pills: death had snuck on him like a blanket, cool as a wind and just as ephemeral. Booker bites his tongue at the thought. Spits out the blood, and then he watches it swirl down the drain, washed-out pink. His tongue’s healed before he can so much as feel the sting.

He stomps out, a little grumpy; he can feel irritation like a cloud hovering over his shoulders. It doesn’t help that Nicky and Nile are still- frustratingly- jumpy. At least Joe’s retreated to the bathroom; Booker thinks he’ll scream if he has to deal with all three while in this mood.

“Sandwich?”

Booker takes one from Nile. It’s utter shit. He bites down, grimaces, and keeps going at the look on her face. 

“I’m  _ fine,”  _ he says, when his throat doesn’t feel clogged with that awful bread. “Stop fucking hovering. Both of you.” Booker checks his shoulder as the bathroom door opens and Joe emerges, frowning. “All three of you,” he amends.

“You had to spend a week there,” says Nile carefully. “Look. It’s- it’s dangerous. You’re doing the most dangerous job here.”

“Like those idiots would’ve figured out I wasn’t one of them,” says Booker flatly. 

_ “Libretto,”  _ says Nicky, and he sounds fucking- bad.  _ Bad.  _ Booker bites his tongue again, and swallows the blood. “Libretto, we didn’t know how bad they were before you got in. Joe- the things we heard through his earpiece- the things they were  _ saying-” _

“What were they saying?” demands Booker. “They were a bunch of morons who deserved to get blown up. The people in charge were psychopaths and the people working for them were sadists, and I’m not  _ sorry  _ for killing them, and I certainly don’t need you to do fucking therapy for me for that, goddammit!”

Nile sighs, slumping down into her chair. “You’re not acting normal, either.”

Booker stares at her. He isn’t. But that isn’t because of anything other than the niggling ideas still digging at him from that phrase.  _ Time bomb,  _ he thinks, and has to fight not to reach for a notebook and start sketching ideas. Instead, he looks up at Nile, wordlessly.

What’s he supposed to say?

_ I’m trying to figure out a way to die. _

_ I’m trying to figure out why I won’t die. _

_ I know you’ll disagree with me, but you can’t stop me. I’m not going to let you stop me. I’m not going to let you keep me from Clotilde, not for all the fucking  _ years  _ I’ve suffered- I won’t- this is mine, this is mine- this is- _

“Oh, Libretto,” says Nicky, and he’s ruffling Booker’s hair, and-

-and it’s not like Booker’s hair hasn’t been gripped in the intervening years but suddenly all that Booker can think of is Clotilde: her hand in his hair, her face flushed with laughter, her eyes like sunlight off of winter snow. He turns, knocking the hand away, but it’s too late. There’s just ash there. Ash and grief and pain, and agony- and a snow mountain, and screams as loud as his spite is hot, and a grave in which Booker would have buried himself, a corpse’s hand tight about his skull, and the sharp flash of Nicky, knife in hand, Booker’s hair chopped off, cold and ice and grief and-

_ “Booker,”  _ says- Joe. Not a corpse. Not a dead person. Just Joe. He’s the strongest of them; he’s holding Booker by the shoulders. His eyes are large, whites showing all around. “Book, what the  _ fuck-” _

The door bangs open, and all of them flinch for weapons. Andy strolls in, dark hair grown out from London to hang about her shoulders in a choppy cut. There’s a bruise spreading over her collarbone and a cut beneath her eye, but she’s grinning.

The grin fades when she takes in the room.

Booker feels, abruptly, sick. “I’m  _ fine,”  _ he snarls, and wrenches away from Joe.

Stalks over to his room. Kicks the door closed. Collapses on the bed, head in his hands, and forces himself to breathe.

_ I’m going mad,  _ he thinks. 

(He doesn’t have anything that he’s kept for these years: nothing to hold onto; nothing he trusted himself with. Andy has Quynh’s necklace; Joe and Nicky have their swords. But Booker’s buried his family with his own two hands. He has given them shrines, a hundred of them, constructed with safety and permanence, dotted over the world. 

But he has kept nothing for himself.)

_ This is madness,  _ he thinks, and remembers Nile’s advice to him once: the first step to recovery is to acknowledge that there’s a problem.  _ This is madness,  _ he says, again, and this time it’s a flat, even statement of truth.  _ This is madness:  _ an acknowledgement of what Booker’s doing to himself.

He acknowledges it, and understands it, and then he folds it away. For more than 250 years, he’s survived this madness; Booker’s only teetering now because his desire to see Clotilde- the idea that he’s so damn  _ close-  _ is unbalancing him. Madness is something that he knows very, very well. He will not let it consume him now. 

Folds it away: into the cold, hollow parts of his soul. Into the darkness which he’ll never let see light. Into the vine-filled craters of his grief and his loss.

He acknowledges it, and he moves past it, because Booker’s not going to ruin the best thing to happen to him since Raphael’s wedding. He’s  _ not. _

…

The next morning, he wakes up to sunlight pouring into the grimy window. Booker levers himself out of bed and into the kitchen. There’s ink smears on his hands- he’d clutched a pen too hard last night and it’d burst, spilling blue all over his shirt- but they’re dried enough that they don’t stain the can of corned beef he rustles out of one of the cupboards.

“That,” says Andy, “is disgusting.”

Booker rolls his eyes back at her. “You’ve literally eaten a rabbit raw. In front of me.”

“That rabbit wasn’t sitting in its own juices for the past twenty years.”

“We can’t get food poisoning.”

“We can’t  _ die  _ of food poisoning.”

“What a pity,” says Booker pitilessly. “No more raw rabbit for you mere mortals.”

“You eat snails and draw the line at rabbit?” says Andy, but there’s a light of laughter in her eyes, and Booker can’t quite stop himself from slipping into the usual banter to retort: “At least  _ I’ve  _ got taste.”

Joe walks in, perfectly on cue, and blanches so hard at the can in Booker’s hands that he looks ghostly. 

“That,” says Andy, through laughter, “is the right response, Yusuf. He’s the only one here with any taste.”

“He’s with Nicky, though,” Booker points out. Joe’s shoulders slump, and he shuffles over to search the cupboards himself, seemingly resigned to being made fun of. “And I’ve seen him survive on mangrove roots for months on end. So, really-”

“-the only competition is between you and Nile,” finishes Andy. “The woman who’ll jump off of skyscrapers and the man that’ll imprison his family in one.”

Booker laughs. He’s the only one to do so; Joe turned around so fast at Andy’s words that the door to the cupboard has been practically ripped off, and Nile, just leaving her room, looks utterly horrified. Booker laughs harder.

_ “Andromache,”  _ says Joe, rumbling and low. He’s not turning to look at Booker, but his shoulders are hovering somewhere about his ears. “What the fuck.”

“Yeah,” echoes Nile, floating closer to their group but not actually joining. “What he said. What the fuck, Andy? It’s, like, barely sunrise.”

“Don’t be hard on her,” says Booker, before Andy can defend herself. “Time waits for no man, and all that rot.”

_ “Booker-” _

“Hey, Joe, you remember when I came back to you guys? In- fuck- 1849?”

Joe eyes him warily. “Yes.”

“I told you not to hold back.”

“You wanted someone to punch you because you were too drunk to punch yourself.”

“Well,” says Booker helplessly. “Yes.”

“You told Andy the same thing?” asks Joe slowly. 

“Andy’s nothing if not a soldier,” says Booker, and grins at her. “She follow orders exemplarily.”

Nile whirls on Andy. “Are you telling me that you decided to attack Booker with  _ six thousand years  _ of experience because he told you not to fucking coddle him?”

“Sometimes he needs a wakeup call,” says Andy calmly. “And I’m not going to be around for much longer to keep giving them.”

“I don’t mind being your colon,” says Booker cheerfully. At Nile’s incomprehension, he elaborates: “Colon absorbs bile in the body. I’m the colon, she’s the bile.”

Nile looks like she’s trying not to gag. “What the  _ fuck.” _

“We’re missing the point,” says Andy, in accented Vietnamese. 

They all have accents when talking in Vietnamese- accents that they’ve picked, or have deliberately chosen to have. Booker’s is French down to the bones, r’s buzzing down his tongue and syllables slurred together; Joe’s is an eclectic Arabic, the native accent of his ancient life given new birth in Quynh’s mothertongue; Nicky’s is slower, precise and, while pitch-perfect, just hesitant enough to give the air of someone submersing themselves in the language.

It’s the language they’ve chosen to mean solemnity; solemnity and grimness and gritted teeth and white, clenched muscles. 

It’s the language meant for memory.

Booker sighs at her words and props his hip back against the counter. Joe drags Nicky out from their room. Nile settles on the top of the table; there aren’t any chairs besides the one that Andy’s occupying.

“We’re worried about you,” says Andy bluntly.

Booker lifts a shoulder. “I’m not sure what you want from me.”

“You blanked out on us. Nearly wrestled Nicky to the ground.” Joe hesitates. “That’s not… normal.”

“Still not hearing what you want from me,” says Booker, baring his teeth.

Like hell is he going to make their lives  _ easier. _

“Book,” says Andy, looking tired. “We’ve been going on missions non-stop for- a hell of a long time, now. It’s been tough on us all.”

“You want to slow them down?”

“I’ve had downtime,” says Andy. “We spens half our time sitting in a bunker and researching. Or talking with Copley about what to research. Or watching you do some batshit  _ insane  _ things while putting yourself through a fucking shredder. Or researching how to get you out before you shred yourself.”

Booker puts another spoonful of corned beef in his mouth. “Which of you guys decided to get lazy, then?”

Nile grimaces. “None of us. We- I- measured how much time we worked last year. You’ve been diving from one mission to another for- months. Probably longer, but that’s about as far back as we could remember last night.”

“So,” says Booker. “So. You’re thinking that I lost my head because I’m too involved in the missions?”

“You’re the one infiltrating their bases, Libretto,” says Nicky disbelievingly. “You’re the one walking into danger while we sit and do nothing.”

“And yet,” mutters Booker, “you have a better arse than me.”

Joe turns back to Nile. “There’s no fucking  _ point.” _

“Fine,” says Booker. They all look at him. He sets aside the can, folds his arms over his chest, and tries not to let guilt bite at him too hard. This will only help him. This  _ can  _ only help him. It’s not his fault if his idea of handling a problem is by diving headfirst into another. “Fine. I’ll take a break. If you guys are that fucking worried, and you want me to- fucking- sunbathe for a week. I’ll do it.”

_ Tick-tock. Time bomb. _

_ Tick-fucking-tock, motherfucker. _

“Not for us,” says Nile, bright eyes rounded with worry. “For you, Booker. So you can figure out who the Sebastien le Livre of your-”

“-Nile-”

_ “-no-” _

“-maybe-”

Nile sputters to a halt when Andy, Joe and Nicky all reach for her reflexively. Booker very carefully doesn’t go for Nile’s throat: he’s clutching the wooden counter behind him, and he can hear it crunch under his grip. He remembers Andy’s face: white, streaked with blood, respect and wariness like twin lions pacing in her eyes. The fire of the Congo; the pain of that bastard accountskeeper. Anger, twined through his bone like a ligament of fire and flood.

“No,” he says, and keeps his voice pleasant through an incredible amount of self-control. “Go on. I’m not quite so hotheaded as immediately after torture, Nicolo; I’m not going to cut off Nile’s fucking head.”

“To be fair,” says Andy after an awful pause, “you didn’t cut off my head either.”

“Right!” exclaims Booker. “See, I’m reasonable.”

Nicky steps away from Nile. Joe, who’d actually stepped closer to Booker when Booker was still unsure of his own control- which, of all things that Joe’s done in his life, is incredibly fucking courageous- steps even closer.

“Take a break, Book,” says Joe gently. “We want you. We’ll always want you. But we want you as the best man you can be. Not… torturing yourself for this. For us. You deserve better. You know that, don’t you?”

Booker closes his eyes.  _ Tick-fucking-tock,  _ he thinks miserably. He nods.

Then he opens his eyes, and dredges insouciance up from somewhere in those cratered pockets of his soul.

“Good planning,” he tells Andy. “I’d never have thought you capable of it.” At the incredulous frozen pause, Booker lifts his brows. “Or are you telling me that they didn’t know?”

“It wasn’t  _ planned-”  _ begins Nile, before Andy interrupts her.

“A good general always knows the battlefield.”

Booker loves Andy. He does. They all do.

But  _ goddamn _ if she doesn’t make that difficult. 

(Mirrors, he thinks. Mirrors and grief. Andy wants something that she can fix. Booker wants the same. It isn’t her fault that she’s chosen to fix Booker, who’s decided to keep his broken, jagged pieces right where they are, thank you very fucking much.)

“I saw you in Belgium,” says Booker tiredly. “The only reason you love Quynh’s because she reminds you that we aren’t just your fucking soldiers, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t bother waiting for Andy’s flinch, or anybody else’s horror. Just strides into his room, and picks up the bag. There’s ink smeared over the floor in great dark pools that might resemble blood in the dark. Booker pauses at them and remembers a lake in Tanzania, dark as midnight and still as glass. He’d drowned himself in that lake just two months ago saving a kid from traffickers, but Booker had got him out with time to spare and no casualties apart from three bullet wounds. He thinks about apologizing to the others when he steps out, but it’s useless; it’s always been useless. 

“A year, then,” he says to nobody in particular. “I’ll see you in Toronto. Cheers.”

When he steps outside, the air is fresher: not so moldy. Clean and heavy with humidity. Warm. The barest hint of salt. 

_ Tick-tock,  _ he thinks, and kicks the heels of his shoes to the beat as he makes his way to the airport.


End file.
